I had just finished my least favourite exercise at the gym tonight when a woman got my attention to say that the exercise wasn’t a good one to be done alone, and was worried I could hurt my back. The reason I dislike this particular exercise ran along those lines already, but I did it because that’s the workout we did when I was doing it as part of winter training with a workout buddy.

Of course, I’m always willing to improve myself and my workout (otherwise I wouldn’t be at the gym in the first place), so I asked this woman what I should do to fix the problem. First she said, “You should try using this machine instead,” pointing to a second piece of the same equipment. Huh? I asked for clarification, and she mentioned some other ways of using the same equipment but work totally different muscle groups. Now this woman had credentials of sorts, so I was inclined to take her advice, but even I know that arms and legs are different muscles.

The conversation was going nowhere fast. I started getting a defensive vibe from her, which made me think I was making her think I didn’t believe her or wasn’t interested. So, we quickly dropped it and went our separate ways. It kept bugging me though. I’m more than happy to switch this exercise for another, but what was she talking about? What exactly had her criticism been? What could I do to avoid the problem? What was going on?

I caught up with her later to ask a few questions and see what advice she might have, trying very hard to seem open to the conversation and willing to fix what she saw as something bad in my routine. I don’t think she took it well. I was trying to strike up a friendly conversation—something I rarely do with strangers!—and even had conversation to make, but she still came off as highly defensive, as if I was attacking her opinion. She was actually a bit of a bitch about it.

I had a philosophy professor who used to say that in order to say something is wrong, you have to be able both to point out what exactly is wrong and how to fix it. I never really agreed that you needed the second part, but it certainly would have been nice in this case. Now I’m left at the mercy of the internet, googling for new exercises to replace what I’ll be too self-conscious to do again, instead of getting… well, advice from a random stranger. I guess I’m no worse off.

When I’m not listening to CBC during the drive to and from work, it’s a mix CD my mom made. It is her car after all. There are a handful of songs I like, but most I just skip over.

There was one that I was sure was a Madonna song, which I wouldn’t have expected from my mom but she does have varied tastes. For weeks I just skipped it after the first three seconds or so, but then one day I was distracted by something (possibly keeping my eye on the road) and let the song play. After about 10 or 20 seconds, what I was sure was a Madonna song turned into what I know is an ABBA song. I don’t know which ABBA song, but I recognized part of the music from an ABBA mashup techno megamix thing I had once. A melody of glissandos. I’d sing it for you but you can’t type that.

So then I stopped skipping the song. I didn’t want to have anything to do with Madonna, but an ABBA song is fine by me. If it came out today, I thought, it would probably do well. It could easily fit in with the pop charts of the day, as far as I knew. I got into the habit of listening to it on my way to the gym, as it was a good kind of song to get a person pumped up and bouncy.

I figured I should get a copy for myself and maybe add it to my erg playlist—something which requires lots of pumping up. The only problem was that at the very beginning the vocals say, with the beat, “Time goes by… so slowly… time goes by…. so slowly” which is the last thing someone wants to hear at any point during, say, a ninety minute steady state.

Nonetheless I figured I could edit that part out and the rest would be good, so I asked my mom what the name of that ABBA song on her CD was.

“ABBA song? What ABBA song?”

“You know, the one that goes like (me singing melodic glissandos)”

“Oh, that’s by Madonna.”

Damn.

Trying to blog after a bike ride is like trying to tell people about that awesome dream you just had.

It’s a side effect of letting your mind wander, I think. That’s all dreaming is—your brain finding something to entertain itself with while you sleep. There’s not much to do while biking around the neighbourhood for an hour, so thoughts and ideas pop up and fade away without the concentration to remember them.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. Yesterday there was lots to do while biking around the neighbourhood.

And by that I mean there was one thing. A speed trap to play with.

The local police have this robo-cop gizmo that sits by the road telling you how fast you’re going, armed, presumably, with a camera to record speeders. This one was set up on a little stretch of road between my house and my old elementary school, halfway down a little hill. I think that road gets about four cars a day, but if that’s where the cops want to fight crime then so be it…

The fun part was biking over the crest of the hill, seeing the display wake up, and finding out how fast I was going. If I were in a car I might have slowed down, but I was on a bike and so my goal was to see how fast I could go. I only planned to go down that road once but altered my route slightly to give it a few tries. My actual speed going down the hill topped off at about 35 km/h, but I found that leaning my head forward suddenly bumped what the robocop recorded as high as 59 km/h. Since the speed limit there is 50 km/h, I’m hoping it recorded pictures of me speeding down the hill at a breakneck pace. The police will think they’ve caught some dastardly criminal and will be all set to trace a license plate number to send the ticket when—BAM!—there I am, faster than a speeding… well, a speeding car.

• Shooting fish in a barrel actually is easy.
• Milk is the best treatment for spicy-mouth.
• A bull in a china shop doesn’t do very much damage.
• Elephants really are afraid of mice.

Thanks, Mythbusters.

Also, the roads in Sydney are alive. Or at least, medians on the Harbour Bridge can crawl across the road to different lanes. The video of cars swerving around them as they moved was hilarious. Thanks, Daily Planet.

Overall, a fun evening with the Discovery Channel.

PS: If you google “harbour bridge”, the first hit is the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and the second is the Saint John Harbour Bridge. Hooray for my town.

If you ask what I did on just about any day in the month of April, if I answered honestly chances are pretty good that I watched some Battlestar Galactica. The miniseries in 2003 and the opening episode of the television series were amazing. Then it got boring for a season or so, and then more interesting again.

The basic idea is that a race of robots (Cylons) built by some faraway colonies of humans rebelled and killed everybody, and are now hunting down the last survivors in a rag tag fleet of spaceships, while both sides try to find Earth. The Cylons now have 12 humanoid models that are indistinguishable from the real McCoy. Of these, seven have been known for a while, and the remaining “Final Five” have been something of a mystery that the first seven don’t talk about. At the end of the third season, four of the final five were revealed, and now the big question on everybody’s mind is who that last one is.

And now begin the spoilers
(more…)

I’m coming up to a big move, and as such I’m faced with the problem of cramming everything I own into the back of a van. A big part of the solution, as it has been every time before, is to reduce the amount of stuff that I actually own.

The first to go were the many binders of notes I have collected over my undergraduate career. When the course is freshly over it’s sometimes hard to part with these, especially since most of the courses I’ve taken had a Part Two hot on their heels. Now that there are no more Part Two’s, the hardest part was hauling the bag of paper down to the curb on recycling day.

Textbooks were a similar case. I went to Haven Books Haven Books about a week ago to drop off about 15 textbooks ranging from anthropology and ethics to astrophysics and quantum mechanics. A select few—those which may be a legitimate resource in graduate school—are still on my bookcase. The fun thing about Haven was that with each textbook consigned, if the same book already exists at the store they tell you what it’s price is. One book I was going to sell for $10 was already there for $40. Ok, I thought, I might as well raise my price to $20—I still wanted it to sell, after all. Another, which I was putting on for $5, was there already for $20. Again, I could have raised the price, but considering that the book retails brand new for only $15, I didn’t think it was a smart move.

The really fun part has come today, after having put some things on craigslist. Who knew that minidiscs were in such high demand? And from middle aged immigrants no less! I’ve had no fewer than five phone calls in the four hours since the ad went live, all with different European accents, all wanting me to deliver, and a few strong opinions about proper craigslist etiquette.

Apparently, as I was told by one particularly cranky guy, it shouldn’t matter that I’ve already promised the MDs to another guy and am simply waiting for him to pick them up. It should be first come, first served. Personally I wonder how the rules of shotgun could be adapted to this situation. Are transactions which happen primarily by telephone subject to the line-of-sight rule, for example? In any case, as I’m the owner of the goods in question, I think it’s only fair that I set the rules of sale. I told him to call back tomorrow and if they’re still here they’re his. Maybe I should be more strict and demand that until the money is in my hands, no sale has been made.

As long as I avoid someone showing up at my door to collect something that is no longer here, I’ll be happy.

Some time ago I got the idea into my head that I would like anchovies. I’m not sure exactly what it was, but I’m sure adjusting to a Japanese diet (where fish are in everything) and a love of Caesar salad (which has anchovies) played a role. The problem tended to be that nobody actually sells anchovy pizza anymore. At least, not at the time I was looking for it.

Turns out that Double Pizza in Montreal does. So at pizza night this past Tuesday, we finally went for it. One medium pizza, with anchovies, tomato, and onion.

The anchovies themselves weren’t bad. They were just what you’d except from having fish on your pizza. What was not expected was the horrific layer of salt they come with. I couldn’t even pick off the tomatoes without getting about a thousand milligrams of sodium in each bite.

So if salty pizza is your thing—and I don’t mean pretzels and potato chips salty, I mean brine from the Dead Sea salty—then get the anchovies. Next week I’m switching back to Hawaiian.

This easter I thought I’d be a bit ambitious and expand my confectionery skill set to something from my younger years — home made cream eggs. Not quite Cadbury style, but more like Laura Secord. Big honking things you eat by the slice.

The first step was lots and lots of sugar.

Which are combined with all manner of equally unhealthy things into a nice sweet dough. One third is turned into yolks…

… to be wrapped up in the remaining two thirds. This is one time where you really can put the fried egg back in the shell. Suck it, entropy!

Then the delicious dipping step.

Sure, you could use a fondue fork, but chopsticks work just as well. I also bought a candy thermometer for this step. Slightly needless, true, but a necessary step in getting a kitchen as well equipped as my mother’s. (I still need a spurtle.)

Finally we’re left with rows and rows of chocolate covered cream eggs, ready to cause all sorts of cavities and diabetes.

But, something was amiss. Still sitting on the counter, I saw this

A cup of butter still sitting in the bowl I set it in to soften. It turns out there was a misprint in the recipe (which had come from a newspaper), which though corrected by my mother, was corrected in such a way that was not clear on the photocopy I had. I had noticed it still unused as I kneaded my sugar-dough, but assumed it was for the dipping chocolate. Oh well. We’ll call these the diet, and slightly less creamy, version. Still good.

Oh, and if you’re wondering what I did with the extra chocolate, the answer is obvious.

It was a healthy, sundae, though. I mean, look at all those banana chunks.

So, a day after this adventure began, the final product is ready for the eating. Some things will need to be correct for next year (using the butter, for one, and fixing the white-to-yolk ratio), but I think they turned out pretty well considering. Yum.

I’ve heard a lot of people mentioning how ridiculously snowy it is in Montreal this year. I wasn’t too convinced that it was really that much snow—we get big snowstorms now and again—but then I remembered that those big snowstorms used to be two or three times a year. I wouldn’t be surprised if we’ve had at least forty two landmark blizzards in the last two weeks. I was finally convinced that there really has been an inordinate amount of snow when I tried to leave my building this morning:

Not that I mind climbing over snowbanks to get out of my front door. Or anywhere else in this city. To be fair, the tips of snowbanks shouldn’t really count toward how deep the snow is, but it is still fair to say that anywhere with less than 2 or 3 feet could legitimately be called “shallow” right now. And also “rare”.

The shoveled version of my front walk is only mildly better, even if it does call to mind various frightening scenarios.

Yes. Pirates and jellyfish. My paranoid delusions about deep snowy passageways don’t have to be internally consistent.

The weather has been pretty weird around Montreal the last day or so. At least I’m told that it’s weird. The grocery store stopped delivering because of the cold, my morning workout was canceled due to snow, and I keep hearing about weather warnings. The particular strange type of precipitation that’s going on outside right now reminded me about a conversation I had with someone the other day about all the different types of snow. I may not have as many words for it as the Inuit (assuming the rumours are true) but it’s more than one.

• Fluffy: This is the typical, nice, romantic type snow that comes down in snowflakes the size of your fist. It looks very good on television, and from indoors sitting in front of a fireplace.
• Sticky: The stuff snowballs are made from. Fluffy snow is useless for anything other than kicking it around like cotton balls. It’s sticky snow that’s the best to play in. You can grab a handful and find a snowball in your hand, and it makes elaborate Calvin and Hobbes style snowscapes possible.
• Granular: This is the weird stuff I walked through today to get groceries. It was basically hailing out rather than snow, but it had been going on for so long that the snow on the ground had quite a thick layer of it. It was like walking through really coarse sand.
• Invisible: Usually the first few snowfalls of the season are nothing but invisible snow. Or maybe phantom snow would be a better name. You can see it falling, but it doesn’t stick, disappearing the instant it hits the ground. It barely counts as snowing at all.
• Skeletal: Where invisible snow is the first stuff you see, skeletal snow is the last. Snow on the ground never melts uniformly. All sorts of factors come into play, I’m sure, like air pockets and dirt on the surface. The effect is that the snowbanks decay from the inside out in places, making strange tunnels and passage. The formerly smooth surface gives way to a crystalline structure with dusty spires and icy caves.

And, my personal favourite,

• Crusty: I think this is caused by the snow changing to freezing rain. You can a nice thick crust on top of the snow that, if you’re very careful, you can walk on without breaking. Or, if it does break, it makes a big satisfying cracking noise and you fall into the softer stuff beneath. If you pick up a slice of the crust, it’ll usually have fluffy snow stuck to the underside of it. It’s better than breaking the crust of a crème brûlée.

This is sticking to the natural stuff, i.e., not brown, yellow, or the firm compact stuff in the middle of sidewalks. I’m sure there are others as well, and there can definitely be combos. Today there’s about a half inch of black ice on the sidewalks (which really makes it grey ice, I guess), a layer of the soft and fluffy, topped off with the granular stuff from today’s hail. The black ice/fluffy combination is particularly dastardly, since one false step will send you flying and you’ll never see it coming.